Frequently Asked Questions About Roaming Profiles
- What Is a Roaming Profile?
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Users of Dragon Medical dictation software create a User Profile when first using the software. This user profile includes information about how a person sounds (acoustical information), words used (vocabulary), and the expectation of words both on their own and in juxtaposition to other words (line with model). This user profile information is separate from the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical software program itself. A good analogy for this is a Microsoft Word document is data that is separate from the Microsoft Word software program.
User profiles can be installed on the local hard drive (C:), a flash drive or other removable media, or can live on a server and can be accessed through a network or Internet connection (roaming). The concept behind roaming user profiles is that a practitioner can access their user file data from any computer with an appropriate version of Dragon Medical installed that has access to the server location of the user profile data.
- What Are the Primary Advantages of Roaming Profiles?
- The largest single advantage of a roaming profile is that a user does not have to maintain multiple user profiles to use multiple PCs. This not only leads to a "smarter" user profile, but minimizes the need to "sync up" multiple profiles. In addition, this greatly increases the ease-of-use for a practitioner that travels between PC workstations or works in multiple locations.
- What Is the General Structure of Roaming Profiles?
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Roaming profiles uses a mirrored data approach much like a PDA. Basically, this means that there is a master profile held out on the server, and each PC that accesses this master profile has a clone called a "local cache" profile. This allows for the effective transfer of data between user sessions and the master profile.
Just like with a PDA, the first time a user opens their NaturallySpeaking profile on a properly configured computer the entire user profile (approximately 30-40 MB) is brought to the local cache file. All subsequent sessions merely look for changes between the local cache file and the master roaming profile. This allows for very small amounts of data to be required to keep a user updated.
When properly configured the master roaming profile is only accessed at the beginning and end of every user session. This minimizes risk of user profile corruption. It is generally recommended that even with this configuration users avoid opening their user profile on multiple computers at the same time (concurrent sessions).
- How Do I Know If I Am Using a Roaming Profile?
- When the user first opens their user profile from the open user dialog box the location of this user is indicated at the bottom of the dialog. Currently, all valid users are located in the Dragon 9 Roaming directory.
- Is It Possible to Open Somebody Else's Profile?
- Yes, there is no password protection on user profiles. Therefore it is very important that the user is verified prior to opening, and should one inadvertently open another user it is imperative that the user profile data is not saved upon exit (this is accomplished by answering No to the "save changes to user profile" question at the end of the session).
- Will I Be Able to Access the User Profile from Non-Networked Computers?
- Generally, no. However, user profiles can be maintained on flash drives and the user profile can be opened from this media if necessary.
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